After entertaining global audiences with her acting skills for over 60 years, Oscar winning actor Judi Dench has hinted at retirement from her acting career due to her ongoing health issue. 

Judi has enjoyed glittering careers both on stage and on screen. Now, in her latest interview, she revealed that her career in films might be over.

Bidding adieu

She was asked about her other movie projects in the pipeline when she attended the Chelsea Flower Show in London this week. She told The Mirror, “No, no. I can’t even see!”

When asked for further comment on Judi’s remarks, her agent intervened, and said that she had nothing further to add. The Oscar winner last appeared in the 2022 movie Spirited.

Judi, 89, suffers from macular degeneration of her eyes, which can cause permanent and rapid central vision loss.

About her eye condition

The actor first revealed that she was diagnosed with macular degeneration in 2012, after there was speculation about her eyesight.

At an event for the London-based Vision Foundation in 2021, she opened up about how she had been coping with her eyesight, which is worsening, when it came to reading scripts.

"You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult. I've had to find another way of learning lines and things, which is having great friends of mine repeat them to me over and over and over again,” Judi said, adding, “So I have to learn through repetition, and I just hope that people won't notice too much if all the lines are completely hopeless!"

During a February 2023 appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Judi noted that as her vision deteriorates, it becomes harder to memorise lines since she has a photographic memory.

“I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines but also tells me where they appear on the page," the Philomena star said. "I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them. I could do the whole of Twelfth Night right now."

Judi’s illustrious career

It was in 1957 when Judi made her stage debut, and went on to become one of the world’s most revered icons. She won an Oscar for her eight-minute appearance as Queen Elizabeth I in the 1998 Shakespeare in Love. She found a whole new fanbase in the pop culture with her role of M, James Bond’s boss at security service MI6, in eight of the films, starting from 1995 film GoldenEye and ending with a cameo appearance in 2015’s Spectre.

Read Also: panchayat star neena gupta talks about the supporting actor label and the solution to it - ‘the society is patriarchal…’ | exclusive